Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a method for extracting textual information (OCR data) from a target image and converting it into a different format. OCR is commonly used to digitize documents that were not previously in a digital form or when an original, digital copy is inaccessible. One example use of OCR involves the extraction of a license plate number from a vehicle using a digital image of the license plate taken with a camera.
OCR does not always provide flawless transcriptions of the textual information within the target image, however. Errors can occur due to such factors as an unknown font in the target image, a subject in the target image being disposed at an angle, or an existence of dirt, smudges, scratches, or glare within the target image.
In order to correct such errors, users of OCR devices customarily visually skim through the transcribed OCR data looking for character errors and word errors. Such an error correction technique can require substantial time, depending on the amount of textual information contained within the target image. Furthermore, errors can be accidentally missed using such an error correction approach.